13 January 2012

Yuri Norstein’s Animation Top 20 (2003)

The great Russian animator Yuri Norstein (aka Yuriy Norshteyn, b. 1941)
is widely admired in Japan by both mainstream and independent animators
alike. His works The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and The Tale of Tales (1978) topped the Laputa
Top 150 Japanese and World Animation poll done in 2003. His work is so beloved that even his
unfinished adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s
short story The Overcoat entered the
list at #92. Norstein himself
participated in the 2003 poll and his picks are listed below.

But first, a bit of background
information:

Yuri Norstein has close ties to the Laputa International Animation Festival. The festival
began in 2000 and semi-annually presents the Yuri Norstein Award (ユーリ・ノルシュテイン大賞) – with, I believe, Norstein
himself acting as the head of the jury. The prize was jointly awarded in its inaugural
year to Hiroyuki Tsutita for his
film Mutate and to Hiroshi Okuda for Prisoner. Oscar-winner animator
Kunio Katō won the Yuri Norstein
Award twice: first in 2001 for The Apple Incident and again in 2004 for
The Diary of Tortov Roddle. Hosokawa
Susumu won the award in 2005 for Demons
and Yusuke Sakamoto won in 2006 for The Telegraph Pole Mother. In 2008, the award was given to a
non-Japanese for the first time. Latvian
animator Vladimir Leschiov took the
prize for Lost In Snow. It was my understanding that the award would
be given out again in 2010, but I have been unable to find any evidence of this
happening – though they did show a retrospective of Norstein’s works at the
festival that year. The next festival
will have an activist theme as they put out a call for “Fukushima Animation”
last autumn. It is unclear when the 11th
festival will take place.

2007 saw the establishment of the Laputa Art Animation School – a “small
school” where they teach the art of making animation by hand (puppet, cutout,
drawn, etc.). The school creation is
credited to Norstein’s insistence that Japan needed its own school of animation
in the vein of the great Eastern European centres for training animators. The school even uses Norstein’s iconic
hedgehog as their logo. At Laputa,
indisputed masters of the art of animation including Fumiko Magari and Sumiko Hosaka –
puppet masters who worked for Tadanari
Okamoto and Kihachirō Kawamoto –
and the avant-garde legend Yōji Kuri
teach students the tricks of the trade.

There are no surprises in Yuri Norstein’s top 20. He lists a cross-section of some of the very
best in world animation with nods to both early animation pioneers (Ladislaw
Starewicz, Alexandre Alexeieff, Claire Parker, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Norman
McLaren, David Hand, Jiří Trnka) and terrific contemporary work (Nick Park,
Aleksandr Petrov, Michael Dudok de Wit).
He even gives a nod to his Japanese hosts in recognizing the work of
Osamu Tezuka and Kihachirō Kawamoto. If
you were teaching a course on world animation of the 20th century and
could only show 20 films – this list would suit nicely. Though you would be hard-pressed to find a
copy of Frantisek Vystrcil’s The Place in
the Sun.